January 7, 2018

On January 2nd, an NY Times article about the protests in Iran included a couple of paragraphs that caught my eye:

For decades, those living in Iran’s provincial towns and villages were regarded as the backbone of the country’s Islamic regime. They tended to be conservative, averse to change and pious followers of the sober Islamic lifestyle promoted by the state.

In less than a decade, all that has changed. A 14-year drought has emptied villages, with residents moving to nearby cities where they often struggle to find jobs. Access to satellite television and, more important, the mobile internet has widened their world.

In a nutshell, these are exactly the sort of social/ecological contradictions that helped to pave the way for the Syrian revolution as I pointed out in an article titled “Syria, Water and the Fall from Eden”, where I quoted a high-level government official:

There is no more rain, but there are more and more people. We forget that we are living in the desert here and that more than a quarter of the Syrian population now lives in Damascus. We have no water anymore and our Barada River cries. In the plain, in the Ghuta, it’s the same thing: there used to be five large springs there that fed the crops. They have all dried up.

In going through 16 years of articles on Lexis-Nexis about the drought in Iran, I came across a Financial Times article dated August 21, 2014 that cited a high-level government official who was just as terror-stricken:

Thousands of villages rely on water tankers for supplies, according to local media, while businessmen complain shortages are a daily hazard in factories around Tehran. At least a dozen of the country’s 31 provinces will have to be evacuated over the next 20 years unless the problem is addressed, according to a water official who declined to be named.

The situation may be even worse than that, says Issa Kalantari, a reform-minded agriculture minister in the 1990s. “Iran, with 7,000 years of history, will not be liveable in 20 years’ time if the rapid and exponential destruction of groundwater resources continues,” he warns, adding that the shortages pose a bigger threat to Iran than its nuclear crisis, Israel or the US.

It is important to understand that the migration of countryside people to the cities of Syria and Iran was not exclusively made up of people like the Joad family in “Grapes of Wrath”. It did not just include farmers but those tied into the agrarian economy as well– such as farm equipment vendors and their workers, shopkeepers, professionals and the like. When the farm is the hub of a wheel, the spokes will certainly be affected when it is removed.

Most dramatically, Iran has suffered the loss of major sources of water in the last few decades that were as much of a cultural landmark as they were economically critical. It would be somewhat analogous to the Rio Grande river drying up in the USA (a not far-fetched comparison in light of this article.)

On September 18, 2001, the NY Times reported that Lake Hamoun, Iran’s largest body of fresh water and one of the largest in the world, had turned into a desert. The drought was to blame but so was the geopolitical conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which controlled a major dam on the Hirmand River that fed Lake Hamoun. Despite a 30-year-old agreement that allowed some water to flow even in dry years, the Taliban cut off the supply. After the Taliban were ousted, the American-supported regime had just as little interest in cooperation with Iran for obvious reasons. As I pointed out in my review of Müşerref Yetim’s “Negotiating International Water Rights: Resource Conflict in Turkey, Syria and Iraq”, this is not uncommon:

Competition for Euphrates and Tigris water has reverberated in domestic politics, especially in Iraq and Turkey. Following the March 1975 Algiers Agreement between Iran and Iraq, Iraq began to step up suppression of the Kurdish movement in the north. This prompted Syria to undermine Saddam Hussein by reducing the Euphrates flow. In effect, the conflicts between states in the Middle East over strategic goals almost inevitably spills over into the conflicts over water.

Lake Urmia, another key water resource, was also deeply impacted but in this instance, drought was conjoined with government mismanagement to create an environmental disaster as the Guardian reported on September 6, 2011. This time it was not an Afghan dam that was drying up a lake but the 36 dams within Iran built on rivers flowing into Lake Urmia. Since Urmia was a salt lake, the ecological impact would be catastrophic for farms surrounding it. When salt lakes go dry, the salt diffuses into the surrounding terrain and will kill crops such as almond and garlic found near Lake Urmia. It is also necessary to understand that its loss would be a major loss to the Azeri people who lived in the region. This video shows a protest held in September 2011 about the pending loss of the lake.

One other example should give you an idea of the gravity of the situation. Zayanderud is a river whose name means “life-giving waters”. In the FT article referenced above, you discover that it has flowed through Isfahan for more than 1,000 years from its source in the Zagros Mountains to the vast wetlands of Gavkhooni south of Isfahan. But the FT now described it as “a vast, gravelly beach, a dead stretch of sun-baked land that winds through the heart of Isfahan”. A man quoted in the article has the exact profile of those who were raising hell a few days ago:

“No water in this river means I had to leave my farmlands in the town of Varzaneh and work for the Isfahan municipality for 15,000 tomans [$5.6] per day,” says Afshin as he cuts weeds on the riverbed.

A loss of this river meant that about two million people who depend on agriculture have lost their income, according to Mostafa Hajjeh-Foroush, head of the agriculture committee of the Isfahan Chamber of Commerce. “If this situation continues they should think of changing jobs,” he adds.

Despite the FT’s obvious neoliberal bias, its analysis of how this came about is quite accurate. Under Ahmadinejad, profits generated through the sale of oil helped to prop up a water distribution system that was unsustainable. As a rentier state, Iran’s economy was based on handouts rather than the production of manufactured goods. Ahmadinejad targeted the farmers as a primary source of support without regard to the broader consequences for the nation. Cheap oil and subsidies made the massive use of pumps feasible just as was the case in Syria. As groundwater became more and more diverted into growing water-hungry crops like melons for the export market, the mostly urban population had to pay the piper. According to the UN, groundwater extraction nearly quadrupled between the 1970s and the year 2000 while the number of wells rose fivefold.

To give you an idea of how irrational such practices can become, the Trend News Agency reported on November 7, 2017 that Iran continues to prioritize the agri-export sector even as increased production yields fewer revenues. Last year exports increased by 15 percent but their value fell by 9 percent.

Watermelon was an exception to the norm. It registered an 18 percent and 33 percent growth in terms of volume and value respectively. This is a water-consuming commodity par excellence and as its name implies is mostly water. Some economists in Iran argue that Iran is actually exporting water in a period of drought.

As the drought and the misuse of water resources began to take its toll on society, Ahmadinejad came up with a novel excuse. In 2012, he made a speech claiming that the drought was “partly intentional, as a result of the enemy destroying the clouds moving towards our country”. Supposedly Europe was using high tech equipment to drain the clouds of raindrops. As might be expected, Global Research found this plausible. To bolster its case, the conspiracist website informed its readers:

Hollywood just released a film on Weather Modification gone mad titled, ‘Geostorm’ right after the worst hurricane season in a century. The film is about a network of satellites designed to control the global climate landscape. The plot of the film is that the satellites turns on Planet Earth with the intention to destroy everything in it by causing catastrophic weather conditions including hurricanes and earthquakes.

“Geostorm” earned a 13% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with one critic opining that a Sharknado or two could have livened things up.

Not to be outdone by Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Yousef Tabatabai-Nejad from the city of Isfahan that lost its legendary life-giving waters blamed the drought on—who else—impious women. In a sermon, he offered this version of why the lakes and rivers were running dry: “They have brought me pictures that shows women by the side of the dry Zayanderud river. These actions will ensure the upper stream of the river will become dry too. Believe me it is true. You may ask yourself why European countries with so much crime and sin have so much rainfall … God punishes the believer, for remaining silent and letting girls take pictures by the river as if they were in European countries.”

Although the Ayatollah might be dismissed as Iran’s version of the idiot living in the White House, he reflects a deep structural problem in the political system that militates against a solution to these deeply entrenched policies that are typical of the short-term mindset of rentier states. With the revenues generated by oil exports, it is likely that the elites will not pay much attention to the overall need for a sustainable economy but to seek out technical solutions, the most recent of which is the use of desalination plants.

Ahmadinejad, the conspiracy theorist, initiated something called the Caspian Project that envisioned a vast network of pipelines that pumped desalinated water to the major cities. This was met with skepticism by the nation’s water and environmental experts who warned that the infrastructure necessary for such a system would cripple fragile agricultural communities and ruin ecosystems, especially near the desalination plants. These massive operations separate the salt from the incoming water and funnel the brine byproduct back into the ocean. In so doing, it has caused irreparable damage to marine life. In effect, you are robbing Peter to pay Paul. There are also heavy financing requirements that are just as onerous as those involved in building nuclear power plants. If Iran is in a race to build a society that has a future, it is probably a big mistake to use technologies so wedded to the past.

There is only one scholarly article that deals with these intractable problems, which fortunately can be read online. Titled “Iran’s Socio-economic Drought: Challenges of a Water-Bankrupt Nation”, it reviews the main causes of the crisis in terms geared to a mainstream audience. The section on the role of agriculture is worth quoting in its entirety:

The agricultural sector uses up to 92 percent of Iran’s water. Due to having an oil-based economy, Iran has overlooked the economic efficiency of its agricultural sector in its modern history.10 The desire for increased agricultural productivity has encouraged an expansion of cultivated areas and infrastructure across the country. However, this sector is not yet industrialized and is suffering from outdated farming technologies and practices leading to very low efficiency in irrigation and production.

The agricultural sector in Iran is economically inefficient and its contribution to gross domestic product has decreased over time. Irrigated agriculture is the dominant practice, while the economic return on water use in this sector is significantly low, and crop patterns across the country are inappropriate and incompatible with water availability conditions in most areas. Recently, concerns about the embodied water content of produced and exported crops have increased, but business still continues as usual as interest in crop choice by farmers is mostly correlated with crop market prices and their traditional crop choices in the area.

The claimed interest in improving the living conditions of farmers is inconsistent with their relative income, which has decreased over time due to increasing water scarcity and decreasing productivity. Forced migration from rural to urban areas has been observed in some parts of the country where farming is no longer possible. However, agriculture continues to play a major role in the country, providing employment to more than 20 percent of the population. This role will remain significant as long as alternative job opportunities are unavailable in other sectors such as services and industry. The recent turmoil in Syria underscores that a loss of jobs in the agricultural sector can cause mass migration, creating national security threats and serious tensions.

While I would agree with the general analysis presented above, I would not call the protests a “national security threat”. If anything I have confidence in the ability of ordinary working people to solve the nation’s problems once they overthrow the Maserati-driving elites and their clerical allies and begin to build a society based on the common good rather than personal gain. Iran has long-standing revolutionary traditions that will acquit the country well as the state lurches unsteadily into an approaching storm that will pose very sharp class contradictions.

January 4, 2018

In a few days, I plan to write about the ecological and socio-economic implications of the drought in Iran that has been mentioned as a factor in the recent protests. As I indicated in an article on Syria, the revolution that began in March 2011 was also driven by drought and government failure to adequately provide a sustainable environment for water usage.

It dawned on me that an article I wrote for the online academic journal Class, Race and Corporate Power might help to shed additional light. It deals with the conflicts between Turkey, Iraq, and Syria over access to the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

As the twenty-first century stumbles forward, there is every possibility that the warnings about peak oil might have been overstated. The bourgeoisie is investing heavily in new alternative energy sources such as wind and solar, while at the same time relying on shale oil despite its harmful environmental impact. Whether this will allow capitalist production to move forward perpetually is open to question but it might, in the long run, be overshadowed by a much bigger challenge: peak water. Nations everywhere are contending with dwindling water sources that are necessary not only for capitalist production but biological reproduction as well. This is exacerbated by climate change that has produced drought conditions in much of the world, including California according to some scientists. But nowhere in the world has water become such a critical path for economic and biological sustainability than in the Middle East and North Africa, even to the point of helping to precipitate the civil war in Syria.

A recent and deeply informed book titled Negotiating International Water Rights: Resource Conflict in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq by NYU professor Müşerref Yetim examines tensions between the three states over access to the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers that flow across their borders from north to south. The study evaluates property rights as understood by contending political philosophies ranging from Hobbes to contemporary liberalism based on their applicability to a vexing problem, namely how a free-flowing resource like water can be shared equitably. The book concludes with a case study of the Euphrates-Tigris watercourse that does not leave room for optimism. Considering the intractable wars in the three countries, it would be almost Panglossian to think otherwise.

February 16, 2017

According to some scientists, the water that covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface predated the birth of the planet. Its originated as ice particles floating in outer space more than 4.6 billion years ago even before the birth of the sun. When scientists explore the outer regions of space today in the hope of finding an inhabitable planet, one of the first things they look for is the presence of water. For some of the wealthiest and most powerful men on earth, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, they represent the possibility of a refuge from a dying planet where war and environmental destruction threaten a sixth extinction. It is a supreme irony that Syria, which was part of the Fertile Crescent that gave birth to the earliest civilizations, is a microcosm of the very processes that threaten the planet as a whole.

The Euphrates and Tigris rivers that originate in Turkey and flow southeasterly into Syria and Iraq were critical to fostering the growth of early civilization through the use of irrigation that has been a double-edged sword even to this day. Despite serving the needs of agriculture, irrigation leads to salinization and hence the ruin of the very activity it was designed to support. The earliest agricultural collapse in Mesopotamia (ancient Greek meaning between two rivers, specifically the Euphrates and Tigris) occurred around 4000 BC, once again between 1300 and 900 BC, and then once more again around the seventh and eighth centuries AD.

Salinization is a problem for large-scale agriculture based on irrigation but particularly in semi-arid regions like Syria. All naturally occurring water, including from rainfall, contains salts. but it would be much less of a problem in places like Great Britain where heavy rainfalls wash away the salt deposits that remain in the soil from irrigated sources. In Syria, the salt accumulates and forces the farmer to constantly search for fresh supplies, digging deeper and deeper to draw from the groundwater. Like every nation on earth, including the USA, the aquifers are not an inexhaustible supply. Once our Ogallala aquifer is exhausted in the American Midwest, it will take 6,000 years to replenish. In search of groundwater, farmers dig deeper and deeper wells just as energy corporations do in offshore waters such as the Gulf of Mexico when they search for new oil deposits. In the case of both water and oil, such drilling has costs to the environment. Against the threat of “peak oil” (whether the hypothesis is true or not), there are alternative energy sources. On the most fundamental level, there is no alternative to water.

Even if Syria had the same precipitation levels as Great Britain (as it happens, Syria has higher levels than most nations in the Middle East), it would still be facing the same dilemmas that modern agriculture faces everywhere. Monoculture production of cash crops like cotton and wheat (the two largest farming goods in Syria) is heavily dependent on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that can seep into rivers and lakes leading to all sorts of illnesses, including cancer. In volume one of Capital, Marx described the growth of capitalist agriculture as a curse:

All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility…Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.

An examination of the contradictions of Syrian agriculture bears this out in spades. While it is not the only cause of the revolt that began in March 2011, it is an important part of the class divide between the crony capitalists based in Damascus and the rural poor. This includes those who were forced to leave the land and crowd into the neglected neighborhoods of Homs, Aleppo and Damascus itself. One of those suburban areas that became an epicenter of the struggle is Wadi Barada that was newsworthy for putting the water question into sharp relief. As is so often the case with mainstream reporting on Syria, there is very little context to make sense of Assad’s charge that the rebels in Wadi Barada sabotaged Damascus’s water supplies. This accusation has been repeated in hundreds of pro-Assad websites that have ritually used every opportunity to slander the rebels. In writing this article, I hope to supply the context for the still unfolding Wadi Barada events as well as help understand the broader social and economic challenges that Syria faces under continued Baathist rule. This is a dictatorship that has yet come to terms with the water and farming cul-de-sac and surely never will.

In 2007 Transaction Publishers came out with journalist Francesca de Châtel’s Water, Sheikhs and Dam Builders: Stories of People and Water in the Middle East, an indispensable guide to the Syrian story as well as those of other countries in the Middle East and North Africa that in one way or another are pursuing unsustainable water and farming policies. While I strongly recommend purchasing the book, an alternative would be to read the articles on her website that were expanded upon in her book. Trained as an architect, the Dutch journalist lived in Damascus from 2006 until 2010, where she worked as the managing editor and editor-in-chief of Syria Today. While there, she began writing about water issues in Syria and the region.

Chapter one of her book is titled “The Death of the Garden of Eden”, an allusion to the four rivers mentioned in Genesis, including the Euphrates and Tigris. Since the story of Adam and Eve is likely based on Sumerian mythology, there is little doubt that the Fertile Crescent was a garden of Eden in antiquity. How it fell from grace has little to do with God but the problems of irrigation that have haunted the region for millennia. The epigraph for this chapter that precedes the current crisis has a prophetic quality:

There is no more rain, but there are more and more people. We forget that we are living in the desert here and that more than a quarter of the Syrian population now lives in Damascus. We have no water anymore and our Barada River cries. In the plain, in the Ghuta, it’s the same thing: there used to be five large springs there that fed the crops. They have all dried up.

The Barada River was indispensable to the rise of Damascus as the crown jewel of the Arab world. Its name is reflected in the tormented suburb Wadi Barada that means Barada Valley. In 1834 a British traveler described Damascus as “a city of hidden palaces, of copses, and gardens, and fountains, and bubbling streams.” The Barada river was “the juice of her life,” a “gushing and ice-cold torrent that tumbles from the snowy sides of Anti-Lebanon” (the mountain range that borders Lebanon and Syria.)

Converging with the Barada River were springs to the north of Damascus, including Ain el Fije that was home to the pumping station allegedly blown up by rebels or tainted by diesel fuel—the story shifts from one Assadist website to another. The various water sources flowed into the city via seven canals that were built during or before Roman presence in the region. For many, the well-watered wonders of the city were paradisiacal.

Today they are much more infernal as de Châtel writes:

I crossed one of the seven canals of the Barada, the Manias. Today its riverbed, which winds between and beneath the medieval town and skirts the thick city walls, little more than an open sewer. A thin sliver of water trickles between garbage and rotting vegetables, and a foul stench rises up from the river.

Now only untreated sewage flows through the canals to irrigate the Ghuta referred to in the epigraph above—the area that housed the very same villages that Assad attacked with Sarin gas in 2013. At the time the Assadists blamed the rebels for an alleged “false flag” incident in the same fashion they are now accused for cutting off Damascus’s water supply.

Today the Barada is no longer used to irrigate the farmlands surrounding Damascus, only to supply the faucets of the city’s burgeoning population. When de Châtel was gathering the material for her book a decade ago, Barada and Ain el Fije had already ceased to meet the needs of Damascus. By the 1990s, the water deficit had risen to 40 percent. In the plains around Damascus, the shortage was felt most acutely by farmers who depended on irrigation, particularly in Ghuta.

The Syrian government hoped to alleviate water shortages in the countryside by persuading farmers to use drip irrigation rather than traditional methods. While it succeeded to some extent on pilot projects, it was constrained by a couple of factors. It required a capital investment that many poorer farmers could not afford and relied on wells that had already begun to run dry. This was felt most keenly by the farmers of Wadi Barada whose water sources had been diverted to Damascus. As these farmers found it more and more difficult to stay afloat economically, they moved into the overcrowded city and thus became another element in the vicious cycle that was impoverishing the countryside and city simultaneously.

For the newly arrived, Damascus bore little resemblance to the glossy image of the city drawn by Assad’s defenders. High-rises sprang up like mushrooms to accommodate families but without proper sanitation, water supplies and ventilation. During the 1980s, half of Damascus lived in squalor. As the city expanded outwards, Ghuta was swept into its maw and began to have the character of Paris’s banlieues. Trees were felled and farmland was turned into empty lots for the cheap housing geared to the poor. One can assume that the fierce resistance of Ghuta to this day stems from such neglect. Accompanying a water department official named Nizar, de Châtel reports on what she saw there:

We drove out of the village and found ourselves in the desert. A few houses were dotted around, slapped together with rough concrete blocks and splatters of cement. They lay in a wasteland: flat, gray soil, barren and infertile. A few pumps could be seen in the fields. But there was no water to pump. “This was the middle of the Ghuta Oasis,” said Nizar. “These were all apricot orchards. As far as the eye could reach. Look at it now!” I asked what the farmers here did now, as there was nothing to live off anymore. “They go to the city to find work. Anywhere. And in the winter they hope and pray for rain.” I was speechless, it seemed unbelievable: acres and acres of desolation, punctuated only by gnarled tree stumps.

When de Châtel asks Nizar why the government was doing nothing to address the situation in Ghuta, he replied: “1 will tell you a secret: the Arab governments have no idea about long-term planning. They have no vision, no plan. In Syria, we are all sleeping. And maybe, just maybe, the day when the water really runs out and we face a disaster, we will wake up.” One might surmise that Nizar was speaking for most Syrians when he described such a feckless government that not only lacked a vision for the water crisis but the country’s well-being in general.

In a kind of perfect storm, the water crisis reached catastrophic dimensions in 2010 when a drought cut deeply into the country’s already depleted supplies. In 2014, Peter Gleick, the director of the Pacific Institute, a think-tank devoted to water resources, wrote an article titled Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria that considered the possibility that the 2011 revolt was indirectly related to climate change.

Starting in 2006, Syria experienced drought conditions that lasted for the next five years and that was described by one expert as the “worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago.” In July 2008, the Minister of Agriculture candidly admitted to a UN gathering that the drought was “beyond our capabilities as a country to deal with”. Between 2006 and 2009, around 1.3 million Syrians living in the eastern farming belt were hammered by the drought and among them 800,000 lost their livelihoods and basic food support. By late 2011, the UN estimated that the drought grew to affect up to three million people—about one out of seven citizens.

As is generally the case, it is impossible at this point to prove that climate change created a specific catastrophe such as the Syrian drought or the superstorm Sandy that devastated the American northeast in 2012. However, Gleick is a highly credentialed scientist who is in a position to make an informed judgment on what was taking place in Syria. If there was no smoking gun to show that the drought was a product of climate change, there was certainly enough circumstantial evidence to say that Syria’s future was guarded at best. Like the journalist Francesca de Châtel, Gleick honed in on the springs of Ain el Fije:

In a more focused hydrologic assessment, downscaled climate change data from transient experiments with regional climate models were used to assess the potential effects of climate change on water availability in the area of the Figeh spring system near Damascus (Smiatek et al. 2013). This water system is one of the largest springs in the world and serves as the drinking water source for nearly three million people. The analysis focused on differences in annual, seasonal, and monthly temperature, precipitation, and water availability measured as spring discharge between present climate (taken as the 1961–90 average) and two future periods (2021–50 and 2070–99), and identified potentially serious reductions in water availability from increased evapotranspiration demand and decreased precipitation. The relative change in mean discharge for the climate ensemble showed a decrease during the peak flow from March to May of up to 220% in the period 2021–50 and almost 250% in the period 2069–98, compared to the past climatic mean. Decreases of this magnitude would have dramatic effects on local water availability. [emphasis added]

Considering the terrible shape of Damascus’s water today, a decrease of 220% in only four years is a forecast of certain doom. Even under the best of circumstances, such a prognosis requires drastic action and a transformation of the Syrian state that would not be guaranteed of success. We can conclude, however, that the Assad dynasty is the ruling class least capable of solving such problems. As the water department official Nizar put it, “Arab governments have no idea about long-term planning. They have no vision, no plan.”

It is also a crowning irony that the two most militarily powerful countries in the world—the USA and Russia—both have presidents that are solidly in the Baathist corner. If Obama never entertained the possibility of “regime change”, Assad can now rest assured that Trump and Putin have given him their blessings as a fellow combatant in the “war on terror”. In addition to their support for arguably the bloodiest dictator in the 21st century, Trump and Putin are also distinguished as being the most high-profile climate change denialists in the world. Trump has called global warming a “hoax” and Putin is on record as stating that “an increase of two or three degrees wouldn’t be so bad for a northern country like Russia. We could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up.”

But what would be the impact on Syria if there was an increase of two or three degrees? It would be catastrophic and arguably one even greater than Assad has visited on the country in six years of war. Military conflict can always come to an end but reversing climate change is far more difficult, especially when the USA and Russia are ruled by men who are averse to reducing greenhouse gases.

Until the rise of capitalism (and capitalist agriculture in particular) in the Middle East and North Africa, traditional societies were adept at conserving water. The qanat, a Persian word, was an ancient system of wells and tunnels that delivered groundwater to villages and farms. It originated 3,000 years ago in a region bordering eastern Turkey and Iran. In ensuing centuries, the technique spread as far as China. The rise of Islamic empires is directly related to this engineering breakthrough. As Arab armies swept toward the West, they brought their knowledge of qanat with them. In Morocco, they became known as khettaras and as madjiras in Spain, the etymological origin of Madrid. When Spain colonized the New World, it brought the technology with it—one good thing amidst all the evils. The qanat can be found in Mexico, Chile and even in the early settlement of Los Angeles, a city that is famous for its appropriation of water in an arid terrain—not unlike Damascus.

For the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and North Africa, water was a precious resource that was husbanded mostly for the production of food. There was no concept of agricultural commodities produced for foreign markets. As such, it was much easier to strike a balance between the needs of a city like Cairo or Damascus and that of the countryside where the peasantry dwelled. Water was the source of life, not cash. Water was so precious that the Persian word for irrigation—abad—became part of many city’s names such as Ahmedabad, which means “irrigated by Ahmed”, a notable who funded the creation of a qanat.

The ancient qanats have fallen into disrepair for the most part. They have been replaced by wells and motor pumps that rely on diesel fuel that became ever increasingly more unaffordable for Syria’s peasantry. Unlike the qanat that rested upon a balance between a settled population and an existing resource, the wells that have spread across Syria like locusts leave nothing behind in their wake except cash and saline deposits.

In the final chapter of her book, Francesca de Châtel profiles some people working to solve Syria’s water crisis. Though neither of them are Syrian, they were deeply committed to the country’s future well-being.

A Dutch anthropologist named Joshka Wessels returned to the abandoned qanats to see if she could make them work once again to the advantage of farmers and townspeople. De Châtel accompanied her to Qara, a small village 100 kilometers north of Damascus to examine her projects.

Wessels is supervising a team of construction workers helping to restore a qanat that had fallen into disrepair. Unlike the wells, they do not rely on machinery. Gravity is used to transport water from higher levels, usually from the sides of mountains or hills, to settlements below. Even though the work has not been completed, the village is enjoying twice the supply of water it once had.

Her team has identified ninety abandoned qanats in Syria and she expressed hope that the breakthrough at Qara could be replicated elsewhere. Within four years of the publication of de Châtel’s book, those hopes would be abandoned in the chaos of Assad’s war on his countrymen.

There was another man in Syria who sought to promote a more appropriate technology. Father Paolo dall’Oglio was a Jesuit priest and founder of a religious community grouped around the Monastery of Mar Musa in the north of Damascus. When Father Pablo came to Mar Musa, it was in the grips of desertification owing to overgrazing, exhaustion of groundwater and the other ills that plagued the Syrian countryside.

He accepted that water was in short supply and sought ways to maximize the impact of what could be tapped from the surrounding area. His first approach was “modern”. He dug wells like everybody else but soon discovered that it produced far too little for his needs. To supplement the water from the wells, he built a small retaining dam at the top of the valley where the monastery was located. Working with local plants, the monks at Mar Musa began to restore the traditional plants and fruit in conformity with an eye to environmental sustainability. By 2001 Mar Musa had become a model for the rest of the country. He had come to the conclusion that water was key to Syria’s survival but only if it obeyed this guideline: “The solution to the water problem is to either make it expensive, or to make it scarce. When water flows freely from the tap, it is taken for granted.”

Besides being a champion of environmental justice, Father Paolo was a partisan of the Syrian revolution. Assad exiled him in 2012 for his advocacy. Ignoring threats to his life and safety, he returned to Syria a year later only to be kidnapped and likely killed by ISIS in Raqqa, the capital of its bogus Caliphate.

Turning now to more recent events, we must consider Wadi Barada as the final and most brutal convergence of water and warfare.

On December 24, 2016, a bomb destroyed the water station there that was fed by the Ain al-Fija spring referred to above. The Assad dictatorship has accused the rebels of setting off the bomb as the ultimate terrorist tactic while they blame Syrian aerial bombardment for the damage. The best appraisal of who is at fault can be found on the BellingCat website of Elliot Higgins that relies on still photos and videos meant to demonstrate that the water station was the “collateral damage” of Syrian aerial bombardment.

As is so often the case with regime propaganda, there have been conflicting accusations against the rebels who either poured diesel fuel into the water supplies to make it undrinkable or set off a bomb to cut it off at the source. More recently the diesel contamination has not been alluded to in government propaganda.

Obviously, the goal should be to repair the water station as soon as possible to get the water flowing again. With government control of Wadi Barada, it would seem reasonable that maintenance crews would be welcome by both sides in the conflict because everybody must understand that without water they are doomed.

That being said, the Wadi Barada Media Center Facebook page points to disturbing signs that the dictatorship does not consider this the higher priority. Although it is in Arabic, an activist named Amr Sahali has taken the trouble to summarize the latest findings there:

Maintenance teams were sent in by the regime, under an agreement with the rebels, to repair the spring four days ago. The Wadi Barada Media Centre has been reporting throughout this time that whenever the teams go in, the regime starts bombing again and they flee. One of the maintenance teams’ cars was damaged and another was burned by the regime’s bombing – these are the same maintenance teams sent in by the regime. Basically, the regime-sent maintenance teams are being protected by the rebels and attacked by the regime. This info isn’t enough for a complete rebuttal of course, but it’s useful to have. There are English language reports about this on their page (you’ll have to scroll down) and videos showing the teams at work and the burning car: https://www.facebook.com/Wadi.Barada

When the Syrian revolution began, Assad’s supporters warned: “Assad or we burn country”. With the slow exhaustion of water that helped to fuel the uprising and now the much more aggressive and total assault on the water supply for 1.6 million Damascenes, it appears that their dark prophecy is finally taking place.

January 16, 2016

In recent days Flint, Michigan has been in the news because the city’s water has not only become undrinkable but also hazardous for use in bathing or dishwashing. To save money, the cash-strapped city discontinued using nearby Detroit’s water supply in April 2014 that fed from Lake Huron and switched to the Flint River. Flint, like most of Michigan’s rust belt including Detroit, has lost tax revenue because the auto industry and most manufacturing began to go belly up in the 1970s.

Not long after the city began drawing water from the Flint River, residents began to complain about the foul smell and taste of the water. Scientists conducted a test and discovered that there were levels of lead that were dangerous to one’s health. The lead was not found in the Flint River itself but leached from the lead in pipelines that had corroded under the impact of the river’s excessively chloridated water, about 8 times as much as that found in Detroit’s and likely the result of road salts flowing into the river as well as the chlorine used for purification. To complicate matters, by interacting with the pipelines the chlorine had dissipated as part of a chemical reaction and lost its ability to suppress bacteria. Flint has had a spike in Legionnaire’s Disease, with ten fatalities since the switch. Undoubtedly there is a connection to this epidemic and water contamination.

Thus, the water had a double whammy of lead and toxic organisms.

As of last month, more than 43 people had elevated levels of lead in their bloodstream. Lead poisoning is a serious business. Not only is it painful, it can also lead to permanent brain damage—and ultimately to death. In the 1970s there were frequent reports about young children getting lead poisoning by eating paint chips in slum housing to slake their hunger.

City residents have been living under a Greek-style austerity regime ever since December 2011 presided over by “emergency managers” appointed by Republican Governor Rick Snyder. In 2014, the switch to Flint River was mandated by Darnell Early, an African-American and long-time Democrat. After leaving Flint in such dire straits, Early went on to his next job running Detroit’s school system. The city’s teachers have staged a series of “sickouts” to protest cutbacks in health coverage.

As another sign of Democratic Party dereliction of duty, the local EPA chief Susan Hedman learned about the contamination threat in February 2015 but failed to put it on the front burner until November. A Huffington Post article dated January 12th provides telling detail on the EPA’s role in the disaster. It appears that after an EPA whistle-blower named Miguel Del Toral released a report on the hazardous state of Flint’s water to a city resident, Hedman sought damage control rather than an emergency response. A phalanx of local officialdom assured the world that everything was okay:

City and state officials downplayed Del Toral’s report, and the EPA said it was only a draft that wasn’t supposed to be released. Brad Wurfel, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, told a local reporter in July that “anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax.” In August, department officials met with Flint residents — including Walters — and told them that Del Toral had been “handled” and that his report wouldn’t be finalized.

Although I’ve never been to Flint, I probably know more about the city than most people having read Sol Dollinger’s “Not Automatic” and having interviewed him about doing political work in the city alongside his wife Genora in the 1940s and 50s.

Sol’s book was a chronicle of the Flint sit-down strike of 1937 in which Genora played a key role as organizer of the women’s auxiliary that fought the cops in a famous pitched battle outside the GM plant gates. As she recounted in an oral history session with Susan Rosenthal in 1995, Flint was as poverty-stricken in 1937 as it is today:

Conditions in Flint before the strike were very, very depressing for working people. We had a large influx of workers come into the city from the deep South. They came north to find jobs, because there was no work back home. They came with their furniture strapped on old jalopies and they’d move into the cheapest housing that they could find. Usually these were just little one- or two-room structures with no inside plumbing and no inside heating arrangements. They just had kerosene heaters to heat their wash water, their bath water, and their homes. You could smell kerosene all over their clothing. They were very poor.

Another important source of knowledge about Flint comes from Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me”, his first film and by far his best. It begins by recounting his father’s job on the assembly line making a good union wage that was made possible by the 1937 strike that the film includes footage from. Whether or not Moore also credited FDR’s New Deal as well, I cannot remember at this point but there is little doubt that as Moore became more of an establishment figure that is certainly how he saw the “good years” of the 1950s—a product of workers struggles and FDR’s taking on the fat cats. What is missing in Moore’s analysis and that of the Democratic Party left that remains nostalgic for the New Deal is an understanding of how capitalism works.

Flint collapsed not because GM boss Roger Smith was a bad guy or because Ronald Reagan became president but because the auto industry became unprofitable. Capital flows where profits can be made. To think that Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, Pittsburgh or any other of these rust belt cities can return to the “good old days” is utopian capitalism, to coin a phrase.

This is not to say that we should not single out Republicans for being evil bastards. This Rick Snyder, who gained his wealth as a venture capitalist, is about as bad as they come. He supports open shop legislation, which would have the effect of undermining what’s left of the organized labor movement in Michigan. He is also hostile to abortion rights and blocked same-sex couples from sharing health benefits as do married couples enjoy (a right that “radicals” opposed to gay marriage fail to appreciate.) His last “accomplishment” was banning Syrian refugees from Michigan.

Although he never wrote about Flint specifically, I could not help but think of James O’Connor as I read about the water crisis over the past few days. Now 85, O’Connor has dropped out of sight over the past fifteen years at least, attributable to advancing years and a host of health problems as I understand it. That is too bad because he certainly would have a lot to say about what is going on the USA today, just as much as David Harvey, Naomi Klein, or any other critic of the capitalist system if not more so.

I got to know O’Connor a bit in the late 90s when he was a subscriber to PEN-L. We exchanged friendly emails from time to time that led to him inviting me to write an article about David Harvey for the journal “Capitalism, Nature and Socialism” at the time. Probably a mistake for him to extend the invitation and me for accepting it since I find writing on the Internet much less problematic.

In any case, despite my angry response to him nixing the article, I remain influenced by his writings and urge younger comrades not familiar with his work to look into them since they remain as relevant as ever, especially his theory of the “second contradiction of capitalism” that can be read in “Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Socialism” online.

O’Connor describes what is happening around the country with alacrity:

Examples of capitalist accumulation impairing or destroying capital’s own conditions, hence threatening its own profits and capacity to produce and accumulate more capital, are many and varied. The warming of the atmosphere will inevitably destroy people, places, and profits, not to speak of other species life. Acid rain destroys forests and lakes and buildings and profits alike. Salinization of water tables, toxic wastes, and soil erosion impair nature and profitability. The pesticide treadmill destroys profits as well as nature. Urban capital running on an ((urban renewal treadmill” impairs its own conditions, hence profits, for example, in the form of congestion costs and high rents.’ The decrepit state of the physical infrastructure in the United States may also be mentioned in this connection.

The first contradiction is generated by the tendency for capitalism to expand. The system cannot exist in stasis such as precapitalist modes of productions such as feudalism. A capitalist system that is based on what Marx calls “simple reproduction” and what many greens call “maintenance” is an impossibility. Unless there is a steady and increasing flow of profits into the system, it will die. Profit is the source of new investment which in turn fuels technological innovation and, consequently, ever-increasing replacement of living labor by machinery. Profit is also generated through layoffs, speedup and other more draconian measures.

However, according to O’Connor, as capital’s power over labor increases, there will be a contradictory tendency for profit in the capitalist system as a whole to decrease. This first contradiction of capital then can be defined as what obtains “when individual capitals attempt to defend or restore profits by increasing labor productivity, speeding up work, cutting wages, and using other time-honored ways of getting more production from fewer workers.” The unintended result is that the worker’s loss in wages reduces the final demand for consumer commodities as is obviously borne out by the closing of Wal-Mart stores all around the world this week.

This first contradiction of capital is widespread throughout the United States and the other capitalist countries today. No amount of capitalist maneuvering can mitigate the effects of this downward spiral. Attempts at global management of the problem are doomed to fail since the nation-state remains the instrument of capitalist rule today, no matter how many articles appear in postmodernist venues about “globalization”.

The second contradiction of capital arises out of the problems the system confronts in trying to maintain what Marx called the “conditions of production”. The “conditions of production” require three elements: human labor power which Marx called the “personal conditions of production”, environment which he termed “natural or external conditions of productions” and urban infrastructure, the “general, communal conditions of production”.

All three of these “conditions of productions” are being undermined by the capitalist system itself. The form this takes is conceived in an amorphous and fragmented manner as the environmental crisis, the urban crisis, the education crisis, etc. When these problems become generalized, they threaten the viability of capitalism since they continue to raise the cost of clean air and water, raw materials, infrastructure, etc.

During the early and middle stages of capitalism, the satisfaction of the “conditions of production” were hardly an issue since there was apparently an inexhaustible source of natural resources and the necessary space to build factories, etc. As capitalism reaches its latter phase in the twentieth century, the problems deepen until they reach crisis proportions. At this point, capitalist politicians and ideologues start raising a public debate about the urban and environmental crisis (which are actually interconnected).

What they don’t realize is that these problems are rooted in the capitalist system itself and are constituted as what O’Connor calls the “second contradiction”. He says, “Put simply, the second contradiction states that when individual capitals attempt to defend or restore profits by cutting or externalizing costs, the unintended effect is to reduce the ‘productivity’ of the conditions of production and hence to raise average costs.”

Pesticides in agriculture at first lower, then ultimately increase costs as pests become more chemical-resistant and as the chemicals poison the soil. In Sweden permanent-yield monoforests were expected to keep costs down, but the loss of biodiversity has reduced the productivity of forest ecosystems and the size of the trees themselves. A final example is nuclear power that was supposed to reduce energy costs but had the opposite effect.

If capitalism were a rational system, it would restructure the conditions of production in such a way as to increase their productivity. The means of doing this is the state itself. The state would, for example, ban cars in urban areas, develop non-toxic pest controls and launch public health programs based on preventative medicine.

Efforts such as these would have to be heavily capitalized. However, competition between rival capitalisms, engendered through the pressures of the “first contradiction” (in other words, the need to expand profits while the buying power of a weakened working-class declines), destroys the possibility for such public investment. As such possibilities decline, the public infrastructure and the natural environment continue to degrade. Each successive stage of degradation in turn raises the cost of production.

What Engels observed in the “Great Towns of England” was an acute crisis based on the Second Contradiction of capitalism. Places like Manchester were becoming uninhabitable due to the necessity of capital to maximize profits without being ready to make the commitment to defend the conditions of the reproduction of capital itself: clean water, fresh air, public health, education, etc.

England, Germany, the United States and Japan of course made great headway in the twentieth century in resolving these types of contradictions at the expense of the colonized world. While the air and water of Manchester may have became *relatively cleaner*, the air and water of Calcutta worsened as the satanic mills of England migrated overseas.

And just as conditions in Flint in 1937, based on the First Contradiction of Capitalism, created the sit-down strike, so will the Second Contradiction lead to protests today. When the stakes were a living wage in 1937; the stakes of living—period—are even greater today: